Native plant a day, day 5 - Smooth beardtongue (Penstemon laevigatus). This Southern Appalachian endemic has really nice reddish stems. It grows wild in wet meadows throughout Virginia and the Carolinas.

Day 4 of gushing about random native plants I find - Ohio spiderwort (Tradescantia ohiensis). Found this guy blooming on top of a Rock outcrop at Shenandoah River SP today. It's shorter than its cousin Virginia spiderwort, and grows in sunnier, drier spaces. Still lovely colors.

Day 3 of sharing a random native plant I find: wild Columbine (Aquilegia canadensis) - this little guy is growing in my front yard. I bought it at a small nursery years ago, but it must be a local mountain ecotype because its stature and flowers are much smaller than most garden varieties you find.

Native plant a day: pink lady slipper orchid (Cypripedium acaule)!

Found a bunch of these beauties blooming today up on great North mountain. They tend to prefer acidic soils while their cousins, yellow lady slippers, tend to grow in calcareous soils.

Native plant a day: Ninebark (Physocarpus opulifolius) - 5/16/25

1.5 years old, planted in a restored grassland in Northern Virginia. When fenced from deer it grows very fast, even in tough dry soils.

Spring in a photo. Trout lily (Erythronium americanum), flowering on a river bank in Maryland. Maybe my favorite spring ephemeral?

I planted these two redbuds (cercis canadensis) as tiny transplants with only two leaves a few years ago. This year they're finally looking like real trees!

Gotta leave your redbuds trunks multi-stemmed to preserve that natural look.

My home for the next few days. Got about 1000 native plants to pot up!

I love how bloodroot leaves kinda hug the stem right when the flowers pop up. Chilly little flower just tryna' warm itself up!

#sanguinariacanadensis #springephemerals #wildflowers #nativeplants

This is where ecological restoration meets art! When clearing invasive buckthorn trees from this native grassland I found they were surrounding a grove of sycamores. Rather than hauling the cut buckthorn stems out to be burned, we used them to build pathway into the grove. #nativeplants #ecoart

Y'all know what time it is. It's bluebell City over here!

My volunteers and I built these cages of bamboo and dormant Rubus stems last year to protect young native shrubs from deer browse. I really like this solution because the woven, thorny stems are not so unlike the natural thickets that would protect developing trees from grazers in the wild.

Christmas ferns (Polystichum acrostichoides) and Cricket (Very goodboy) in the George Washington national Forest!

Christmas ferns are a reliable, flexible evergreen ground cover that grow in lots of different kinds of forests.

False Boneset (Brickellia eupatoroides) seedlings are starting to germinate in the greenhouse! This native beauty surprised me on the edge of the meadow this summer and I had to collect some seeds to propagate. Some might be for sale at Blandy's garden fair this year! #nativeplants #wildflowers

A wall of moss and lichen like this is just amazingly beautiful to me. So many different species jam packed into one little area. The composition of species shift and respond to the changes in weather, surrounding forest, and the substrate beneath. You could study one spot for hours.

Just look at them voluptuous hips. 10/10 would eat. Her name is pasture rose, aka Rosa carolina. She really is a phenomenal Virginia native wild rose that looks great all year. #nativeplants #roses #foraging

Rock polypody (Polypodium virginianum) on a sandstone rock outcrop in a nearly sub-zero day. Look at those little brown sori on the bottom of the fronds! Gotta love the tenacity of these ferns. #nativeplants #ferns

The flowering dogwoods drenched in snow and morning sunlight.